The disclosures involving this (and the prior) administration's Big Brother surveillance state, which would make Nixon blush with envy are now coming fast and furious (one wonders - why now: even that bastion of liberalism the NY Times, has turned against Obama). Although while the Guardian's overnight news that Verizon (and most certainly AT&T as well among others) was cooperating with the NSA on spying on US citizens, so far at least the internet seemed, if only to the great unwashed masses, immune. That is no longer the case following news from the WaPo exposing PRISM, a highly classified program, which has not been disclosed publicly before. "Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy." What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap directly "into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."

The secrecy is so deep we expect even the president himself may not know about it (but he does):

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Of course, PRISM is from the government, and it is here to help you. But the question is why are some of the biggest private companies explicitly collaborating with what is now the biggest exposed spying operation in history, companies which include such household names as Microsoft Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Yes, everyone's beloved Apple was added in October 2012: the NSA knows all about your music playlist, not to mention has a database of all your iMessages.

In other words, all those newly minted people known as corporations are in on it, but not: dear debt serf. It's a small club, and there is a multimillion liquid net-worth cutoff... and you are not in it. From WaPo:

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

...

the PRISM program appears more nearly to resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over “exponential growth” in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.

Spying on US citizens is "incidental"... kinda like killing thousands of women and children in drone raids is "collateral damage":

Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. The same math explains the aphorism, from the John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from any other person.

This is how the big corporations sleep at night:

Formally, in exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority to for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”

In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry, said a lawyer with experience in bridging the gaps, neither side wants to risk a public fight. The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.

Some "do lots of evil" by their customers. They just don't disclose it:

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a company spokesman said. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

Time to kill that Facebook profile... or be accidentally killed for being "of a terroristy persuasion" based on some NSA algo:

There has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and Skype,” according to the 41 PRISM slides. With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”

And some more charts:

Introducing the program

A slide briefing analysts at the National Security Agency about the program touts its effectiveness and features the logos of the companies involved.

Monitoring a target's communication

This diagram shows how the bulk of the world’s electronic communications move through companies based in the United States.

Providers and data

The PRISM program collects a wide range of data from the nine companies, although the details vary by provider.

In retrospect, it is sad what a farce this country has become: artificial market, centrally-planned economy, pervasive spying on the people, a tax collector that target political enemies, an administration that openly lies under oath...

If we didn't know better we would say this was 1955 Stalingrad, although Stalingrad at the height of totalitarianism was for amateurs. This is next level shit: "Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said."

If you are a Democrat or Republican these days you are a traitor to freedom, justice, and the human condition. People need to wakeup that these parties are two sides to the same coin - Bush/Obama are the same.

I'm really glad Facebook and Twitter and and Android and Gmail and Yahoo and Java and Microsoft and Oracle and Apple are secure. For a second there I thought they might be in bed with the CIA and the NSA and ...... but wait.

spy on us, you bet. for the last ten years i have been careful to close the lid to my laptop before jerking off. these peepers are perveaucrats. check out the movie "the lives of others" about east germany before the wall came down.

This.Many times some people overreact when it comes to someone invading our privacy, while forgetting that it is really our responsibility to provide for our privacy if/when we need it. Evidently, there are plenty of solutions already, including free ones, so we can't complain.

A lot of journalists are here, why doesn't one of you guys bust the story about how they have an automatic update for adobe flash player that enables them to watch your screen as you type. There is the last line there, but it is an automatic update for Adobe Flash player. You will notice a slight delay when you type and in my case the fan runs overtime and if you open task manager you can see all the memory allocated to a specail adobe flash update.

US muppets cannot report this to the authorities because they would think we are crazy and they just passed a law allowing them to seize our weapons if we are mentally unfit. The police state is here.

According to the website if yoiu have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. Being a conservative as it turns out (in the NSA and Obama's eyes) is something to hide though, so watch your ass muppets.

Please, as if we are being given an actual choice. We are given a carefully selected and approved red candidate and a carefully selected and approved blue candidate, and aren't they pretty? Both are the same, only differing on minor and meaningless issues, such as abortion and gay marriage. Even the presidential offerings have to be interviewed and approved by Rothschild. What we've got is the illusion of choice rather than the substance of it. Our elections are about as meaningful as those farces they used to hold in the former Soviet Union or the ones Sadam Hussein used to hold or Juan Perron.

And there's one more difference... One is Santa Claus, and the other is a business man. The working middle class can't out vote the 47%, the Occupiers, the 'stuck in their ways' Boomers, AND THE UNIONS...
Edit: Almost forgot the Gen X / Y ers that were sick of Bush & war, and all of the blacks & other minorities looking to make history... I know sides don't matter, though. - So it's all relative.

Hold it, dude! Next you'll be suggesting everyone read Lance DeHaven-Smith's book, Conspiracy Theory in America, as well as How They Got Away With It, White Collar Criminals and the Financial Meltdown?

lolololol! change.org! Their greatest accomplishments are along the "we got cancer boy the make a wish dream vacation he always wanted and he died a week later" lines. It should be feelgoodragecapacitor org.

I just finished reading Black List by Brad Thor, which is about what happens when megalomaniacs with evil intent acquire exactly these kinds of data mining and surveillance capabilities. I thought I was reading fiction, but apparently not. I would gladly give up all the convenience the internet offers if we could somehow undo all this. We are heading toward a very dark place.

I been beating that very same drum hereabouts for years and got shat upon royally, by and large. As I've stated before, one of my acquaintances is mathematician and cryptographer contract employee of said people, and he's said for years, if they want to know it, read it, find it, they will do so easily. All the encryption systems can be bypassed in front or behind.....Wakie wakie time!

Between this story and the IRS story, we are now talking about hundreds of people that need to be removed from their government posts...and prosecuted for violations of the Constitution. Let's get to work then.

Yeah I talked with a relative recently and poiinted out that his new trendy Apple gadget was tracking everything about his life including his physical movements. His response was a shrug and back to using the thing. Afterall, who needs a US Constitution & personal privacy when youve got 'trendy'. Unfortunately that attitude will make his kids slaves.

...And John Wayne skipped WWII to make Cowboy & Indians films. Seriously... is that your point? Fuck me, better never have any actor in a film involving guns who didn't do three tours of Iraq lest "the little people" get upset. Shit. That's the entire 1980's films burnt.

Interestingly enough The Deer Hunter gets a pass, since some of them went to Vietnam.

Wait - mumcard: have you spent time in a combat zone? Or have you ever been employed as an Ex-CIA freelance assassin? Yeah, because I'm thinking you can't possibly watch this film without some kind of edumications. No, really: he's anti-gun, but have YOU been employed as a CIA Assassin?

Please. Re-read that 10 times, you might see my point. Hint: You know that Al Pacino guy in HEAT? Yeah, never robbed a bank. Fuck me, that got me too. And don't even start me on Sigourney Weaver, I've heard she never actually met Aliens.

Ok, there's DERP. And there's you. Take a DERP and then photocopy it like 10,000,000 times. Still not enough DERP for you. Fucking DERP DERP DERP. An Actor can be pro whatever they like: they ACT in a film for .... oh fuck it.

Cash currency is the weak link here being relatively untraceable, so I'll go as far as proposing the plan is to phase out physical currencies by rendering collapse, hence a "NEW" (and not BTC) traceable digital payment system.

Would except that the illegal drug trade depands on cash transactions and the really big players in Drugs, Inc. are the very same people spying on you.

Think we are in Asscrackistan to liberate the people from the Taliban? Silly Rabbit, we are there to liberate the poppy farmers from the Taliban... Opium production back at pre-Taliban levels and trade routes re-opened - all with US tax dollars and US soldier blood.

What a crock of shit. (edit: not you or your post... the lies of US aggression and the phony war on drugs)

If you have to use Windows, set up a Ram Disk, point your cache folders at the Ram Disk and make sure that your Ram Disk doesn't store an image on shutdown. All of the crap gets wiped out from volatile memory on shutdown, and if you have a spare few GB of RAM, this will make things f a s t e r :).

If you want to revisit sites, that's what bookmarks are for! And if you haven't already - get firefox, with don't track me, ghostery or some such plugin to kill the tracking cookies, maybe an adblock and a script blocker too. There are a few other plugins you might wan't to investigate to confuse and obfuscate. Oh, and firefox doesn't dns auto-discovery, AKA wpad. This is A Good Thing. Paranoid mode? Sure, but if it's there and it's free, why not?

Have a peek at your windows firewall too, click on 'outbound connections'. See that big list of crap there? That's everything on your computer that is allowed to to talk to whatever it wants. If you're ONLY web surfing, you only need to allow ports 53, 80, and 443 open on outbound. On inbound you need NOTHING under the same 'only surfing' circumstances. Food for thought....

As far as an SSD drive, I'm not sure you can ever wipe that device. That's good for the stazi when they want to read your drive, so you'll need to encrypt the whole volume to stop them from copying your porn stash.

It's probably time to ditch XP IMHO. Win7 seems run well on even underpowered devices if you knock all of the pretty looking aero stuff off, so it's worth it. XP will no longer be supported by MS after April 2014, so all of the known oustanding vulnerabilities for XP after then will never be fixed and will be sloshing around on the net for all to find. Running old XP apps can be done quite well using W7 compatability mode for the most part too.

I think for XP you would need a proprietry driver as the ramdisk driver from MS is limited to 32MB and is a pain in the ass to install. It's certainly not as straightforward to do as W7.

But do you really want to use MS at all after this revelation? Get a linux distro if you can (though it's tough if you're tied to MS only apps), Ubuntu is good place to start, lots of drivers already installed. If you're up for a proper OS, Scientific Linux is my pref.

Keep it up, guys. Share all your tricks and tips. The internet is like a great big confession booth. What you say here stays here. I mean, it's not as if anything is being STORED or anyone is being PROFILED.

The type of psychopaths that drive this kind of initiative view all of Creation as a conspiracy against them, and will invest [your] top dollar on anything that collects and mines more material and makes them feel more SAFE and IN CONTROL. The Tower of Babel always fails, but at least the failure is well documented for future hecklers to discover and ridicule.

Watch. Before long there will be some kind of incident that makes it obvious just how much this thing is NEEDED. Control mechanisms always require a marketing strategy. Maybe the recent Chinese hacking allegations are part of it. (I wonder about the F-22 weapons system hacking story. Have failed programs ever been swept under the carpet by blaming mysterious intruders?)

They can track physical movements on a cell phone, as well as all your communication through it (or by e-mail or message boards, etc).

I don't think its necessary on the individual level (although must come in handy from time to time), but I am sure they have researched the behavior and movement of crowds, before, during, and after emergencies, for example. Also, I am positive they monitoring phone calls right after events, to see what people's reactions are.

As for "Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data", I guess the obvious answer is that Google lets the government have the data through the front door! Here you go!

They have used sockpuppets to spread disinformation and 'manufacture consent' (they still try to do this, but its more entertaining than anything now). The least we can do is treat them to some disinformation ourselves, I guess?

"Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data"

That was the funniest statement in the entire article! Programmers put back doors in EVERY thing. It's like an artist signing his work. I'm just hoping some über nurd brings this puppy down or I've got to figure out how to post via pigeon?

No back door need. The one true statement I've seen come from Google.Google most likely provides Fiber trunks right to the black core of their datacenter.
I'm shocked that they are not co-locating with NSA up in Utah.

imagine what the dinner conversation was like at the Schmidt house when he got the invitation? probably the same as the home of Joe Sixpack when he got elected HS Prom King. and it's all downhill from there...

Pure fascism...the meshing of corporate and government power. Fuck you, Google! And fuck you, NSA! This "War on Terror" bullshit that has been wrapped-up as patriotically American has all along been the most cowardly, lay-down and wet-themselves action by statists ever achieved in this country. Right to Privacy? Sure, go live in a cave and be denied all access to technology...only be careful, you will arouse the suspicions of these cowardly (paranoid) fucks if you choose not to participate in their serial voyeurism. Just like N. Korea, everyone must applaud the corruption.